Fun with blue cornmeal

The Navajos should object.

Over the past week I've discovered some ways to use up a bag of New Mexican blue cornmeal, most of them bad.

To start with, you can use your blue cornmeal to make the unappealing triple corn Navajo muffins from Blue Corn and Chocolate by Elisabeth Rozin. These squat, super-sweet muffins call for yellow cornmeal, blue cornmeal, and canned creamed corn. Why all three? I'm guessing because "triple corn muffins" sounds sexier than "corn muffins." But sexy these jaundiced midget muffins were not. I imagined I could detect the mucilaginous creamed corn in every bite. So yucky.

A very slightly better use of your blue cornmeal would be to whip up a batch of the blue corn pancakes from Culinaria: The United States.

I don't know what Owen was doing with his hand -- some kind of wizard move to make the leaden pancakes go away?

Thick, stiff, heavy, and gray, drenched in maple syrup these pancakes weren't inedible.

Another alternative: the worst chocolate chip cookies in the world!

Mark: "These are going to be around for a while." 

Crumbly, sandy, cakey, gritty, and sickly looking, the blue cornmeal chocolate chip cookies were baked from a Bob's Red Mill recipe. Thanks, Bob, for keeping things real. There are so many recipes for amazing chocolate chip cookies out there these days, I'd forgotten it was possible to make bad ones.

After three bummer dishes, I gave up on recipes calling specifically for blue cornmeal. I used the last of the blue cornmeal in these lovely and inspired pancakes  from the Essential New York Times Cookbook. 

To make these pancakes -- formally known as Kathleen Claiborne's hot cakes -- you cook your cornmeal (blue or yellow) into a sort of mush and then mix it into an airy batter and fry. What you end up with are beautiful, crusty pancakes with a soft, cornmeal mush center. Mark raved about them. Owen didn't rave -- complimenting me is against his principles -- but requested seconds. All the pancakes were eaten before I thought to take a picture.

And with that delicious breakfast, the blue cornmeal was gone.

I'm not sure how much longer I can continue this little pantry-cleaning series, because it's not turning out to be as inspiring and rewarding as I'd hoped. I'll give it a few more weeks. At the very least need to tackle the dessert wine.

Happy Memorial Day

Clockwise from top: poppyseed torte, chocolate chubbie (from Donald Link's Down South), Pepperidge Farm Milano cookie, a bag of which I received on Mother's Day

In a bookstore yesterday I spent 30 minutes skimming Nina Teicholz's new book, The Big Fat Surprise. The premise -- that saturated fats have been wrongly demonized and are actually essential to good health -- is hardly new, but the book has been getting huge amounts of attention from the mainstream media. Having come of age in the 1980s, to hear that ice cream is probably healthier than sorbet is like hearing that pigs can fly.  What a stunning screw-up on the part of the public health establishment. If I'd ever actually succeeded in sticking to a low-fat diet, I'd be furious right now. 

Fortunately, I failed. I never bought skim milk, cut the fat of my steak, or made an egg white omelet. I wish I could say this was because I knew better, but can't. I didn't adhere to a low-fat diet for the same reason I've never cleaned our refrigerator coils. Seemed like a drag. Couldn't be bothered. Rebellious. Lazy. 

Did I feel guilty about it? You bet I did.

It's going to be hard for nutrition "experts" to get me to believe anything ever again.

Since the last post, I went to my 30th high school reunion (sweet), finished the audiobook of Catherine the Great (tremendous), started the audiobook of On the Noodle Road (not tremendous), and baked a fabulous poppy seed torte out of The Essential New York Times Cookbook. It's a moist, intensely flavored cake so full of poppy seeds it resembles chocolate. If you care, it's gluten-free. Highly recommend.

I haven’t been sticking to a cookbook agenda, which isn’t just a problem for the integrity of this blog, but for me as a cook. Too many options make me crazy. I start flipping through book after book trying to devise a weekly menu plan and hours later I'm still flipping. The one-book-at-a-time program has kept me sane in the past, so I’m recommitting. I'll make 5 to 10 recipes from The New Persian Kitchen over the next week or so.  

As I mentioned in a previous post, New Persian didn't impress the older Iranian ladies in the ESL class where I’m an aide. I think it's the "new" that's the problem. The author, Louisa Shafia, grew up in suburban Philadelphia with an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and Iranian father and it doesn't appear (at least as far as I've read in the book) that she's ever visited Iran. She used to work as a chef in a vegan restaurant and the book contains sentences like: “In general, you’ll find that the recipes here emphasize whole grains and gluten-free flours, use minimal amounts of oil and fat, and call for alternatives to white sugar.” 

None of this means The New Persian Kitchen can't be an excellent cookbook, but might explain why it didn't resonate with a group of Farsi-speaking octogenarians.

So far, the recipes have been solid. Wednesday, I served Shafia’s radish, rhubarb, and strawberry salad. It sounded fresh and unusual and was, though I would not in future put raw rhubarb in a salad or anything else. Raw rhubarb is bad and should not be eaten. Feel free to disagree, but I won't be budged. 

Strawberries, on the other hand, make a tasty addition to a salad, especially when dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I removed this delicious thing from the oven an hour ago, and strawberries dressed with olive oil and balsamic vinegar also make a tasty addition to a cake. (Note: If you make this, don't use a springform pan.)

Thursday night, I served Shafia's chicken salad with potatoes and olives which consists of chopped cooked chicken (rotisserie), green olives, yogurt, potatoes, and roughly 3 tablespoons of freshly ground coriander, fennel, and mustard seed. The tangy yogurt dressing contained just enough olive oil to soften its rough edges and the spices were magical. I'll say it again: MAGICAL. I couldn't get enough of this salad, though I'd omit the potatoes next time and stuff it inside pita bread with cucumbers and tomatoes.

It was just Owen, Mark, and me both nights, as Isabel is rarely home for dinner these days. If she isn’t at dance class, directing a play, or babysitting, she’s out with her friends. I miss her, but understand this is as it should be. Mark, Owen, and I have gotten in the habit of watching TV while we eat dinner and are currently into Game of Thrones, which we love, and Silicon Valley, which I'm ready to abandon. Fargo seems too realistically gory for mealtime, but Penny Dreadful might work. We have lots of fun watching TV together with our plates balanced on our laps, and there are fewer complaints from some quarters about the food. I've also noticed that a lot more salad gets eaten while attention is directed at the screen. All the experts says watching TV while you eat is terrible, but that’s what they said about cooking with butter and cream. I’m not listening anymore. 

A funny little party

 A new photojournalistic low, but I don't like to post pictures of people without asking. That would have meant explaining what a blog is. Maybe even the internet. Maybe even computers.

It’s hard to do justice to the charm and oddity of the ESL class where I volunteer once a week as an aide, but I’ll give it a shot.

Picture a group of (mostly) senior citizens just about evenly divided between sophisticated Iranians and working class Latin Americans. There’s so little cultural overlap between the two groups, it’s not even like apples and oranges. It’s like apples and shiitake mushrooms. A couple of the Iranian women dress like movie stars from the 1960s. A couple of the Latin American men are illiterate. One woman has Alzheimer’s. Another hobbles along with a cane. A few students are very earnest and motivated and a few of them come only to socialize. But everyone likes Wenceslao, a cheerful Salvadoran who wears a hat, plays the accordion, and has something like 57 grandchildren. Personal charisma transcends culture.

The end-of-term party on Wednesday was sweet and, well, a little funky. Mohammed brought Iranian CDs and played them very loud. He and Fatemeh danced for a while. Mohammed was an accountant in Iran and now breaks down boxes on the nightshift at Safeway. “But I’m happy!” he said, happily. I talked to Orfelina and Isila about the difficulties of making pupusas and Orfelina said she doesn’t stuff them, just mixes all the filling ingredients with the masa and fries ‘em up. Adolfo gave me a can of Coca-Cola for Mother’s Day. 

I'd brought in my two Persian cookbooks for vetting by the Iranian ladies, who dismissed The New Persian Kitchen, winner of the 2014 Piglet, but approved of the stout, encyclopedic New Food of Life by Najimieh Batmanglij. (I think New Persian Kitchen is too slim and contemporary for old-timers.) Najar had cooked a lentil dish for the party and Fatemeh had prepared a platter of really tasty baqala polow (rice with dill and fresh fava beans), a recipe for which I found on page 162 of Food of Life. Rosario, who is Mexican and whose front teeth are capped in gold, contributed a big foil container of very soft spaghetti.

Boy, did I eat. I ate like someone who'd spent the morning baking and hadn’t consumed anything except coffee, brownie scraps, and blueberries as of 2 p.m. and now had a splitting headache. I ate and ate and soon the headache was gone.

I ended up bringing a bunch of old favorites: these Essential New York Times Cookbook brownies, the Flour banana bread, Marcella Hazan’s (gluten-free) almond macaroons, and some cut butter cookies from Alice Waters’Art of Simple Food. 

All winners, except the butter cookies. I’d always frosted them before and learned that without frosting they’re not sweet enough.

Sometimes I wonder how I ever found myself in this strange, delightful group of people for whom I feel so much affection, but the answer is simple: I answered a Craiglist ad back in December. One of my best decisions of 2013. 

A fight and then some cookies

my grandmother's cookie jar

Don’t worry, I’m not turning this into a blog about fights with Owen. The following did occur in the kitchen and afterwards I baked cookies. Plus, this dispute was so archetypal I may never need to describe another fight with adolescent Owen again. Only the details change. Good times.

Thursday I came home and found Owen hunched at the table eating cereal. I said, “What happened at school today?”

Owen: “Stuff.” A silence. Then: “When are you going to give me back my iPod Touch? 

He knew the answer to this, but wanted to bicker, to make clear right off the bat that we weren’t friends on this particular afternoon. The answer to the question was: You get the iPod back when you’ve emptied your lunch box, picked up your dirty clothes, finished your homework, and somehow managed not to be a complete jerk during the time it takes to get that done. Good luck with the last part, little buddy. 

The iPod issue passed without detonation.

A few minutes later, he went to the refrigerator, extracted the orange juice, and started swinging the bottle back and forth like a pendulum. It wasn’t a gentle swinging. It was the motion you make when bowling.

“Stop that please,” I said. “It makes me nervous you’re going to drop it.” There is precedent.

He stopped. I didn’t see his eyes light up, but in a cartoon, his eyes would have lit up. Immediately, he began to shake the bottle up and down. It wasn’t a gentle shaking, it was the motion people make when chopping wood with an axe, but faster. I hate the word "bark" when used to describe human speech, especially my own, but I barked: “STOP IT! I told you not to do that.” 

Owen: “What?! You did not!” He continued to shake the orange juice bottle, which I then wrested from his hands and returned to the refrigerator.

Jennifer: “I told you to stop swinging the orange juice.”

Owen: “I wasn’t swinging it, I was shaking it.” 

Jennifer: “You are definitely not getting your iPod back today.”

Owen: “Oh my God, Mom, you're so unfair. I was shaking the orange juice. You have to shake orange juice before you pour it. Don’t you even know that?” The last line spoken with withering condescension.

Et cetera. It went on for about 7 minutes. 

My mistake was shouting at him, engaging, letting know he got my goat. I can break this cycle only by keeping my cool and exacting stiff penalties, but I often find it hard to be unruffled, wise, far-sighted, tired, stern, and intensely irritated in a single moment. 

After that, I made cookies. Owen had said earlier that he wanted chocolate chip cookies, so I made gingersnaps. My paternal grandmother always kept gingersnaps in her cookie jar in the corner of her kitchen. 

 Sometimes when I can't sleep, I walk through their house in my mind. 

Not that anyone other than my sister cares, but you can see the cookie jar against the wall, behind my grandmother's arm. You can even see gingersnaps. They were supermarket gingersnaps the size of silver dollars, dark brown, very hard, incredibly good. I used to get up at night and tip-toe to the kitchen, take a handful of gingersnaps and carry them back to bed where I would eat them in the dark. Why did I feel the need to sneak the cookies? Would my grandmother have reprimanded me for eating them openly? It's possible. She was a cool, strict grandmother, not a soft one. No orange juice-shaking episodes on her watch.

I love gingersnaps. They’re plain-looking cookies, spicy and direct at first bite, but then they open up, become rich, warm, complex. I used the recipe for English gingersnaps from The Essential New York Times Cookbook and baked the cookies at the upper end of the recommended time range so they would be super-hard, which they are, though not as hard as the supermarket gingersnaps Do they use some deadly industrial fat to get the cookies so hard? A chemical? Also, these cookies could use a bit more ginger. But overall? Buttery, lively, crispy, delicious. 

Friday morning I put two gingersnaps in a bag in Owen’s lunchbox. Then I decided to run a little experiment and added two store-bought graham crackers, the '67 Dodge Dart of cookies. 

hopeless

Sometimes the shoe actually fits

nectarines, rhubarb, pistachios

Here’s something I regret all the time: the name of this blog. 

Back when I started out, I gave zero thought to the fact that I was linking my identity to mild drunkenness. Shame! But if I had to go and do something foolish like that, why didn't I just use the word itself rather than a coy, girly euphemism? 

Too late. 

I neither bake nor drink anywhere near as much as I used to. This past week, however, I did. 

Drinking. I reconnected with various friends after the separation of the summer and that called for alcohol. During the course of the merriment, I mastered the pisco sour. I started out mixing the classic Peruvian cocktail in a shaker, but could never work up a significant head of foam. Then, on Saturday I mixed pisco sours for my friend Melanie in the Vitamix and they were nearly perfect. (Any blender would work, I just like to type the word Vitamix as often as possible.) These drinks were pale, pale, pale creamy green and atop the otherworldly liquid floated a layer of snowy meringue. Showstopping.

Last night Mark and I carted the Vitamix up to our friend Hilary's house in Petaluma and made pisco sours for her and her husband, John. I decided these pisco sours might be a little too tart. After leaving Hilary's, we drove the four minutes to my father's house where I made pisco sours for my sister and her husband. (My father tasted one and went back to his martini.) We added more sugar to the pisco sours and now they really were perfect. It had been a long, hot day, I was thirsty, and perfect pisco sours are dangerously refreshing. Everything after the second pisco sour is a blur. Back home, I fell asleep on the couch still wearing my clothes, setting a wonderful example for my impressionable adolescent children. There will be no more pisco sours anytime soon.

For me, that is. You should try one. Here's my recipe, adapted from the recipe in Boozehound which was adapted from the recipe at Hotel Mossone in Huacachina, Peru. The author says to be sure to use key limes, but I didn't and these were outstanding pisco sours.

Into a blender: 3 ounces pisco, 4 teaspoons powdered sugar (more to taste), 1 ounce fresh lime juice, 1 egg white, a generous handful of ice. Blend until the ice is demolished and the drink foamy. Pour into a highball glass. Top with a dash of bitters. Serves one.

Now, baking.

Yesterday I baked the rhubarb peach kuchen from Smoke and Pickles by Edward Lee, a Korean-American chef in Louisville, Kentucky, and took it to my father's as my contribution to that blurry steak dinner. Smoke and Pickles is full strange, intriguing dishes like tobacco cookies, a chilled squash soup garnished with pickled strawberries, rice bowls that contain kimchi and remoulade.  I didn't have peaches so I used nectarines in the kuchen and didn’t peel them, but otherwise stuck close to the recipe.  I wish it had been slightly more exciting as I want this book to amaze me. The kuchen was a good. I want this book to be better than good.

Also, I baked another batch of brownies, this time using a recipe that calls for cocoa powder rather than chocolate. These brownies are decidedly inferior to the brownies I made from The Essential New York Times Cookbook but still tasty enough that Owen ate ten in under ten minutes. Exaggeration, but not much of one.

Having read some of your comments, I compared the ingredient ratios in the Essential New York Times  brownie to those in the Joy of Cooking and Katharine Hepburn brownies. Adjusting for pan size, the Essential New York Times brownie has twice as much chocolate and butter as Joy's. Otherwise it is identical. It contains the same amount of butter, but twice as much chocolate and flour as Katharine Hepburn's brownies. It calls for the same amount of sugar, but the KH brownies contain unsweetened chocolate so this would indeed make the Essential New York Times brownie sweeter. I don't know what any of this means except that there's lots of leeway in the making of brownies. I shall continue testing brownie recipes until we get sick of eating brownies.

That's a Russian tea cake on the left. I rolled it in powdered sugar that I made in the Vitamix. A cup and a half of granulated sugar plus 1 tablespoon of cornstarch. Blend until powdery. Supercool.

I can’t wait to see where this Slate series on entertaining goes. 

Sixty days to Halloween

One day soon Owen is going to stop making things out of every box that comes in the door and I will be sad.

Everyone in the the household under the age of 17 is back in school as of yesterday. I let so much material pile up without posting that I must now resort to a list just to clear the decks.

-This Food52 ceviche is lovely. Halibut is expensive and the piece I bought came attached to skin which made it hard to cut the meat into neat cubes unless you’re really adept at skinning fish. I’m not. In future, I’d buy something skinless and less costly. I initially wrote “skinless and cheaper” but the word “cheap” is a turnoff when discussing fish, as is the word “grey.” In the Time/Life Cooking of Latin America the ceviche recipe calls for “grey sole” and I frowned and turned the page. Irrational. The really beautiful part of this particular ceviche is the watermelon. You think you're just eating a melange of fish and soft red tomato and then you get a bite of crisp, intensely sweet red watermelon. That’s as exciting as eating salad ever gets. Inspired by the excellent ceviche, I tried making this tomato and watermelon salad last night and it just didn’t work for me. Soggy. Since we now had watermelon around and I’m apparently on a Food52 kick, I also whipped up a batch of their boozy watermelon rosemary lemonade in the Vitamix and it was refreshing and not especially intoxicating, which I appreciated.

-Yes. I bought a Vitamix. That's the box in the picture above. My sister picked it up at Costco and it was a pretty good deal, though I'm not sure any Vitamix is precisely a "good deal" unless you inherit it. We’ve used the Vitamix to make milkshakes, creamy alfredo sauce, frozen margaritas, and the aforementioned boozy watermelon lemonade and while I’ve not yet made a kale smoothie, it's true that the minute you buy a Vitamix you start thinking about kale smoothies. I was going to wait to buy the Vitamix until the end of the year and see if the desire passed, but it was preoccupying me to the point of obsession. As Oscar Wilde said, “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it," and while that didn’t work out so well for Oscar, I think it’s sound advice, certainly when what you're talking about is the purchase of a blender. There’s no point in obsessing about a blender for months if you can just go buy the blender and free your mind up to obsess about other things. Like date ice cream. I've always wanted to make date ice cream and I think with a Vitamix this will at last be possible. 

-I was reluctant to end my allegiance of 20 years to Katharine Hepburn's brownies, but this brownie recipe from The Essential New York Times Cookbook is a knockout. I should be glad that I can now bake even tastier brownies, but discovering this recipe was wrenching and unsettling and I feel disloyal to the Katharine Hepburn brownies.

I'll get over it.

Forty? Seventy? Aren't they basically the same?

Back home in California and happy to be here, yammering goats and very small mountain of work notwithstanding. 

But one last post about the New England sojourn:

Last week, Isabel and I drove up to Maine to visit my friend Mary who lives in an old farmhouse full of eclectic furniture, art, and textiles that shouldn’t work together but do: Oriental rugs, Marimekko tablecloths, midcentury modern dining room set, flea market paintings, relief maps, collections of plastic wildcats and old padlocks. I love her house. I mention the decor because I started thinking there’s a strong correlation between how a person puts together a house and how she (or he) cooks. 

None of the dishes Mary served us for dinner should have worked together, but it was a perfect meal. This is what she served: lobster bisque, lobster tacos, chicken tagine. No vegetable, no salad. You aren’t going to see this lineup in the “menu suggestions” of any cookbook and that's a problem with cookbooks. 

But the recipes? They came out of cookbooks and no complaints there.

-lobster bisque. You'll find this 1881 recipe on page 108 of The Essential New York Times Cookbook. I've never cooked lobster and probably never will as lobster = unthinkable luxury in California, but for people who live or vacation in coastal New England, the book is widely available in libraries. It's outstanding, so you should consider buying it and I'm starting to think my mother-in-law's beach house needs a copy. Of this lovely bisque, Amanda Hesser writes: "Everything about the soup is subtle. The lobster flavor is pure but discreet. The sweetness of the Sauternes echoes that of the shellfish, and save for a little zing of cayenne, all the flavors are elegant and restrained." Mary substituted 1% milk for the whole milk Hesser calls for and Okanagan ice wine for the Sauternes. If I could only eat one soup for the rest of my life, this would be it.  

-lobster tacos. This recipe from Mark Miller’s Tacos entails marinating lobster, avocado, and chunks of ripe mango in lime juice and olive oil. You then fold this into soft corn tortillas with some soft lettuce and finish with truffle oil. Mary used pineapple instead of mango and omitted the truffle oil and the tacos were my second favorite part of the meal. I loved them, but loved the bisque more. The recipe is here.

-chicken tagine. In one of Kate Christensen's novels, a 74-year-old woman seduces a 40-year-old man by serving him this chicken tagine, and Christensen includes the recipe in Blue Plate Special, her new memoir. Way to raise expectations! I took a few bites of the tagine and it was very good, but I was too full of lobster to give it my full attention. Isabel, however, loved it and ate thirds. Later, I asked, “Do you think the chicken was really good enough that a 70-year-old woman could use it to seduce a 40-year old man?” She stared at me with precisely the expression you'd expect on the face of a 16-year-old  when her mother asks such a ludicrous question. She said, “No? I don’t know.” And looked away, presumably so I’d shut up.  

If you're curious, the recipe is on Christensen's web site. 

After dinner, Mary said, “I didn’t even offer anyone dessert!” But that’s what made the dinner so great. Dessert would have been conventional and too much.

Bumper crops

Yeah, I guess the new goat babies are sort of cute. Check out the ears on the brown one. Now look at the ears on either of the black ones.

runt in foreground

Back in December, we bred Natalie to a Nigerian Dwarf (upright ears), but he didn't seem tall enough to knock her up, so a Nubian buck (floppy ears) was brought out a few minutes later. Now I think we got kids from both of them. Score! We all favor the runt because people always favor the runt.

I'm continuing the policy of cooking only one item every night, although I'm allowed to make dessert if the mood strikes. I harvested half a laundry basket of monster fava beans on Monday and braised some of them with sage and pancetta, adapting a recipe for peas in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook. I put them on the table next to the rotisserie chicken. (Note: I asked Mark to choose the next 10 dinners, but he declined the offer.)

not sure I'm up to the job

"No fava things for me," Mark said jovially. "I'm on a diet." Isabel tried the favas and disliked their texture; Owen said they didn't taste good. I alone ate the fava beans. Must every blog post include an anecdote of this nature? Apparently. Here's another from the same night:

For dessert, I made David Lebovitz's chocolate-banana ice cream. I used the version of the recipe printed in Ready for Dessert,  but it is also here. It's a super-cool recipe: Puree bananas, melted chocolate, milk, Bailey's Irish liqueur, and rum. Freeze. No machine required. The resulting ice cream is dense, icy, and complex, like a spiked fudgesicle. Mark took a bite and said, "Nope! Too alcoholic." He then served himself a big bowl of Snickers caramel swirl chunk and we sat down on the sofa with our different ice creams and watched Robin Wright have hot flashes on House of Cards. Whatever. The day we start watching different TV shows in different rooms, that's when I'll start to worry.

Last night I made fettuccine with preserved lemon and roasted garlic from The Essential New York Times Cookbook because it looked easy, delicious, and unusual. It was all three. Everyone in the household ate it without complaint. Next time I'd mince the preserved lemon finely like the recipe says, rather than chopping it coarsely like a lazy person does. I'd also add more cheese. It's a great recipe to have on hand for those occasions when you really, really, really don't want to go to the supermarket, which for me is always. Try it.

pretty pound cake baked in new bundt pan

A bunch of crying babies around here

This outstanding recipe for cajeta (a.k.a. dulce de leche) is adapted from My Sweet Mexico by Fany Gerson.

1. First you will need a goat. Can I give you one of mine? In fact, I will give you all of mine. Think of the cajeta. Mmm, cajeta.

2. Milk the goat until you have a quart of milk. No need to pasteurize, though straining is always a good idea. Put the milk in a pot with 1 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon light corn syrup, a big pinch of kosher salt, and the seeds and pod of a vanilla bean. Bring to a boil. Remove from heat.

3. Dissolve 1/4 teaspoon baking soda in 1 tablespoon water. Stir into the milk mixture. Return the pot to the stove and simmer gently for an hour or so, stirring occasionally, until you have a thick caramel sauce. Pull out the vanilla pod, lick clean, discard. Pour cajeta into a jar. Eat with a spoon, spread over crepes, drizzle on ice cream. Store in the refrigerator.

This a cajeta so superior you will never think of putting a can of condensed milk in a pot of boiling water again. I have done that many times and while the can never exploded, the cajeta was never this delicious. Gerson says you can use cow's milk for this recipe, but that "the goat's milk has a distinctive grassy, musky flavor. . . "

Don't you want a goat now? I think you do.

Thanks to Oz for the suggestion.

I made Fran Gage's vanilla bean shortbread this week, and the cookies are lovely, but more fragile than these cookies from Food52 which I made a few weeks ago and which are very similar in flavor. Make these. They're fabulous. My only change to the Food52 recipe would be to omit the colored sugar topping, but if you have children or really want sugar topping, try dipping the bottom of the juice glass in water. Also, let the cookies rest for 2 days. They got better. They got dangerously better.

We were busy this week, so not much other cooking happened, and what little did was not from Bread and Chocolate. It's a tiny boutique of a book and doesn't have dishes for every occasion. My cousins Luis and Ana Maria came to dinner on Friday, and they are in their seventies, Guatemalan, and gastronomically conservative. I couldn't see feeding them Fran Gage's oyster stew or crayfish gazpacho and Ana Maria is gluten intolerant, so the pasta with saffron cream sauce wouldn't work, though it sure sounds good.

Instead, I turned to The Essential New York Times cookbook and made the chicken country captain which was a dream, mostly because it was easy, but also because it was delicious. (This is not the exact recipe, but it is very similar.)  I served the chicken with salad, the so-called perfect pot of rice (also from NYT book) and caramelized endives. Very happy with the meal, though I realized afterwards that I had dredged the chicken with flour, which I hope did not make Ana Maria sick.

Getting back to goats. I try to be mostly honest in this blog, so I will say that lately the goats have had a disastrous effect on my mood. At least I think it's the goats. I feel exhausted and blue and that my life is out of control and everything is too much for me. Which is funny, because rarely has my life been so under control.

Except there's this. Every morning at 5:15 Sparkles has a noisy tantrum. It's like she feels exhausted and blue and that her life is out of control and everything is too much for her. The sun comes up and she looks around and sees that her kids are needy and misbehaving and why is this yard such a mess? Where's the grain? Who overturned the water bucket? Why is her irritating half brother still humping his sister even after he was emasculated? Gross. Calgon, take her away! So she starts yelling.

I get out of bed, prepare milking ablutions, put on manure-caked Crocs, go outside, give Sparkles grain, milk her, right the water bucket, and restock the hay. She settles down, but because now I'm up, I milk Natalie, let the chickens out, and rake the compost pile. If I lived in the country, I would roll over and let Sparkles holler. But we have neighbors.

Then I come inside. By now it's 5:45 a.m. and my husband is grumbling because the goats woke him up and I notice we're out of coffee and what the hell am I going to do with all this goat's milk? Jeez, this rug is filthy. I can't live with it one more day! But of course I will. Gosh, I wish Owen had friends, even though he seems happy enough. . . oh no. NO! Sparkles is yelling again.

And I want to have a tantrum of my own. Sometimes I do. Ask my poor husband.

Update: Sparkles and her babies are gone. An hour ago, the Craigslist ad and my dreams were answered.